Synopsis Part 1

With these words President Thomas Jefferson set in motion the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806. The Corps of Discovery, as it would be called, or the “corps of volunteers for North Western Discovery,” as Meriwether Lewis put it, epitomized the rising glory of the United States—its sense of limitless possibilities and unparalleled opportunities.

The Bicentennial of the expedition was an appropriate time for Americans to revisit this historic event, explore the intervening two hundred years, and try to understand the processes by which the land and the people along the Lewis and Clark Trail have been changed.^[1]For an analysis of the effects of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, see Expedition Legacy.

The spirit behind the opening of the American West was the president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. For twenty years Jefferson had thought about finding a water route to the Pacific Ocean, and establishing an American presence west of the United States.That the West was foreign country didn’t bother Jefferson; his initial efforts occurred while Louisiana belonged to Spain. Indeed, Jefferson named Meriwether Lewis commander of the expedition, and set about preparing him for his duties, long before the opportunity to purchase the Louisiana Territory came along. The consummation of that deal in May 1803 meant only that the expedition would remain on American soil until it crossed the Rocky Mountains. By early 1803 Lewis was in Philadelphia. He took crash courses in medicine, botany, zoology, and celestial observation. He studied maps and journals of traders and trappers who had already reached as far up the Missouri River as the Knife River Villages in North Dakota.^[2]See John Evans’s Map Validated, François-Antoine Larocque, David Thompson, Prior Columbia River Explorers, and Mackenzie’s Canada Crossing. By the time he left Washington he knew as much about the West, and what to do when he got there, as any man in America.

Clark Becomes Co-commander

The President authorized Lewis to select a co-commander, and in June 1803 Lewis offered the position to a 33-year-old ex-army lieutenant from Kentucky, William Clark. Once, for a brief period, Clark had been Meriwether Lewis’s commanding officer. Although Jefferson sought an equivalent captaincy for Clark,^[3]See Clark’s Military Rank. the promotion was denied by the War Department, and Clark was appointed Lieutenant in the Corps of Artillerists. Nevertheless, Lewis had promised Clark that they would share the responsibilities of command equally, and he kept his word, though actually Lewis was in charge, which was what Jefferson had in mind to begin with.

Clark brought complementary abilities to the transcontinental venture. He was a skilled riverman, a superlative geographer, and a first-rate map maker. He imbibed the intellectual curiosity of his generation, but because of limited formal schooling he had trouble writing it down. Like another frontiersman, Andrew Jackson, Clark never had much respect for a man who could think of only one way to spell a word. He outdid himself with the name of the Indian tribe known to Euro-Americans as Sioux, for which he devised twenty-seven ingenious creations, and the surname of Sacagawea‘s French-Canadian husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, which he spelled fifteen different incorrect ways.

For more, see Eastern Beginnings.

Down the Ohio

Lewis left Washington on his historic western journey on the day after Independence Day, 1803. He picked up arms at the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Then he oversaw the construction of his specially-designed 55-foot barge (called the ‘boat’ or ‘barge’ but never the ‘keelboat’) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and floated it down the Ohio River. Clark joined him at Clarksville, Indiana, across from Louisville, Kentucky.

While Lewis went ahead on horseback to St. Louis, Clark and the crew got the barge up the Mississippi, and set up winter quarters on the Wood River in Illinois, opposite the mouth of the Missouri. Meanwhile, Lewis made friends, collected supplies, and gathered more information in the city.

At last, on 14 May 1804, forty-two frontier soldiers and hired hands embarked from Camp Dubois and proceeded up the Missouri toward the Pacific Ocean. Clark was in sole command at the outset; Lewis would join him at St. Charles, Missouri. Until they reached Fort Mandan in today’s northwestern North Dakota, where they spent their second winter, they traveled in the barge and two smaller craft called pirogues, all propelled, as conditions required, by oars, poles, sails, or tow ropes. On 23 September 1806, the expedition would come to its close back in St. Louis, Missouri, after a voyage lasting two years, four months, and ten days.

In the first month of their journey the Corps of Discovery encountered no fewer than eight parties of fur traders floating down to St. Louis. Their reassurances lent energy and conviction to the task. Sailing, rowing, pulling and pushing their craft among the many Missouri River hazards of spring runoff on “The Big Muddy,” they averaged about 15 to 20 miles a day. After the Corps left St. Charles, communication with St. Louis and points East would be infrequent and unreliable. The first report was a brief message Captain Amos Stoddard, the acting commandant of Upper Louisiana, received via one of those returning fur traders—perhaps one they met on 25 May 1804 at St. Johns or La Charrette, the last white settlement on the Missouri: “I have heard from him about 60 miles on his route, and it appears, that he proceeds about 15 miles per day—a velocity seldom witnessed on the Missouri; and this is the more extraordinary as the time required to ascertain the courses of the river and to make the other necessary observations, must considerably retard his progress. His men possess great resolution and they [are in the best] health and spirits.” After that, nothing until Corporal Warfington returned with the barge in late spring the following year.

Meanwhile, firmer bonds were being forged within the Corps. Discipline was firm, punishment quick and harsh (see Courts Martial on the Trail). On the 20 August 1804, Sergeant Charles Floyd, a 22-year-old Kentuckian, died, possibly of peritonitis, and was buried on a bluff near present Sioux City, Iowa. Despite the extreme rigors and deprivations the men were to suffer over the next two years, there were no more fatalities. Nonetheless, every stomach ache thereafter must have aroused a shudder of apprehension.^[4]See Medicine on the Trail, an interview with David Peck, D.O.

Confirmation

Geographically, the first and last segments of their westward voyage were more about confirmation than discovery. in 1796, the trader Jean Baptiste Truteau reported, he had been told by an Indian that the Missouri River originated in “great mountains of rock,” beyond which another “wide and deep river” flowed “in the direction of the winter sunset” to “a large body of water, the other bank of which was not visible.” Four years earlier Robert Gray, the captain of an American trading ship, had sailed into the estuary of that “Great River of the West,” and left with it his vessel’s name, Columbia Rediviva.

Then there was James Mackay, a Scottish trader working for Spain, who visited William Clark at the Wood River camp in January 1804. Mackay had primed John Evans for a trip to the Pacific in 1796, from which Evans learned that the Missouri ran north from its source between chains of the Rockies before it left the mountains, dropping over a great waterfall. Also, Lewis and Clark carried with them the newly-published journal of Alexander Mackenzie, the Canadian fur trader who had crossed present-day Canada in 1793.

From all these sources, and more, the explorers gained a remarkably detailed if not always accurate picture of both the geography and the inhabitants of the west. They knew the general course of the Missouri River, its headwaters, and its principal tributaries. They even had some indication of west-slope streams. Mentally, Euro-Americans had already crossed the continent to the Pacific. The fabled Northwest Passage might just be there.^[5]See Related Explorers.

Although the search for a Northwest Passage was paramount, the Lewis and Clark Expedition was also a combined anthropological, diplomatic, and commercial mission to the Missouri River Indian tribes. Meriwether Lewis’s standard speech promised military protection and trade advantages in return for peace. The first nations to hear this pitch were the Otoes and the Missourias, at a council held on 3 August 1804, north of present-day Omaha, Nebraska. The Indians responded favorably, for they needed both market commodities and protection from their northern neighbors, the Lakota (Teton) Sioux.

The Otoes and Missourias were peaceful, as were the Yankton Sioux, encountered near today’s Sioux City, Iowa. Not so the Teton Sioux, upriver in modern South Dakota. The Teton Sioux had “an attitude.” They had been pushed onto the plains by population pressure in the east, and were now the arbiters of the growing river trade on the middle Missouri. One of their leaders, the Partisan, threatened to stall the expedition. But the with its swivel cannon and the men with their muskets, rifles, and bayonets represented the most formidable array of military power yet to ascend the Missouri.^[6]To learn more about the expedition’s arsenal, see Expedition Weapons by Michael Carrick, How Flintlocks Work, and Lewis’s Air Gun by David Nelson. Nobody backed down. Finally, a calmer head, Black Buffalo’s, prevailed, and the confrontation passed. Lewis and Clark would have yet a few more dicey moments with the Sioux, who were not mollified.^[7]For more, see Lakota Sioux Difficulties and Trail Diplomacy.

Beyond the Sioux, near modern Bismarck/Mandan, North Dakota, were the Arikaras, some two thousand peaceful people. Beyond them, at the mouth of the Knife River, were five earth-lodge villages of Mandans and Hidatsas now called the Knife River Villages. “Villages” is a misnomer. Their combined population was about 4,400; by comparison, the town of St. Louis was then less than one-fourth as large. Some 4,556 descendants of all three tribes now occupy the Fort Berthold Reservation, northwest of the Knife River.^[8]For more detailed North Dakota Tribal Data from the 2010 Census, visit the North Dakota Indian Affairs Commission online.

Near the mouth of the Knife, in late October 1804, the expedition settled down for the winter. There they would find plenty of time to consolidate the information they had already gathered, pare down the troupe, and learn what they could about the west from their new neighbors. They were part of a multicultural, multi-ethnic community, for they were at the international crossroads of the Northern Plains, the commercial center for Indian tribes from far and near, as well as for Spanish, French, and British traders.

For more, see Starting up the Missouri, Past the Omahas, Among the Yanktons, and Crossing the Lakotas.